Not a Gift of Tongues

She spoke in the dialect of mist and persistent drizzle that never lets up, barely
takes a breath. Nonetheless, she rarely finished a story or answered a direct
question. Her punctuation was carved in fallen trees, or sometimes rode a leaf to an unconcerned earth.

After storms, heavy downpours of chaos and obscenity-laced raining, she sighed, resigned to failure, her inability to communicate what she really meant.
"I love you," often rendered in translation as,
"The atmosphere is heavy with uncertainty;
A ubiquitous humidity
Smothers the air between us."

He never understood this, and
Took her lack of clarity and directness
For insensitivity and absence of feeling.

Had she understood this, she might have learned the language of dusk, and
wrapped him in evening's first tease, when light and dark balanced perfectly, with no exact hue ever settled upon.

To this he might have responded better
And offered the comfort
She needed and desired.